The Washington Post has once again given op-ed space to the member of a terrorist organization. In it Mahmoud al-Zahar gets to criticize Israel and praise Jimmy Carter. Zahar of course starts off with an outright falsehood:
President Jimmy Carter’s sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is “business as usual” for the Palestinians.
Israel isn’t choking off fuel supplies to Gaza. The fuel company owners are refusing shipments from Israel.
Yet this Hamas op-ed is different from previous ones. For one thing the tone is much more hostile to Israel, suggesting that Zahar wrote this himself. For another, the Post ran its own editorial countering Zahar.
ON THE OPPOSITE page today we publish an article by the “foreign minister” of Hamas, Mahmoud al-Zahar, that drips with hatred for Israel, and with praise for former president Jimmy Carter. We believe Mr. Zahar’s words are worth publishing because they provide some clarity about the group he helps to lead, a group that Mr. Carter contends is worthy of being included in the Middle East peace process. Mr. Carter himself is holding what appears to be a series of meetings with Hamas leaders during a tour of the Middle East. He met one militant in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Tuesday and was reportedly planning to meet Mr. Zahar in Cairo today before traveling to Damascus for an appointment with Khaled Meshal, Hamas’s top leader.Mr. Zahar lauds Mr. Carter for the “welcome tonic” of saying that no peace process can succeed “unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.” Yet Mr. Zahar has his own preconditions: Before any peace process can “take even its first tiny step,” he says, Israel must withdraw to the 1967 borders and evacuate Jerusalem while preparing for the “return of millions of refugees.” In fact, as Mr. Zahar makes clear, Hamas is not at all interested in a negotiated peace with the Jewish state, whose existence it refuses to accept: “Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begun,” he concludes.
I’m glad that the Post did these two things. It’s more defensible. However, I still don’t believe it should have run the op-ed. The editorial refuting Zahar is strong and points out the extremism of Zahar’s positions. Finally the editorial concludes:
Mr. Carter justifies his meetings with familiar arguments about the value of dialogue with enemies. But he misses the point. Contacts between enemies can be useful: Israel is legendary for such negotiations, and even now it is engaged in back-channel bargaining with Hamas through Egypt. But it is one thing to communicate pragmatically, and quite another to publicly and unconditionally grant recognition and political sanction to a leader or a group that advocates terrorism, mass murder or the extinction of another state. That is what Mr. Carter is doing by lending what is left of his prestige to an avowed terrorist such as Khaled Meshal — or Mahmoud al-Zahar.
It’s good that the Post didn’t let either Carter or Zahar off the hook. I think it would have been better not to publish the op-ed in the first place, but at least like this, readers don’t have to go to far to read a necessary rebuttal.
UPDATE: Elder of Ziyon accentuates the negative.
UPDATE II: Picked up by Buzztracker.
UPDATE III: I must be mellowing. LGF, Meryl, and NRO’s Media Blog all hit the Post hard. And Boker Tov Boulder points out a distinction without a difference in the editorial.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
